<Fatty Acids to Energy with Insulin Resistance>
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🧀 Recap: making energy for an insulin sensitive body
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After glucose from carbohydrates, fatty acids from fats are our second source of energy. My favourite fat-rich choices are macadamias and walnuts — perfect on a big cheese board (camembert, gruyere, and gorgonzola, anyone?).
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So what happens after we gobble up all this delicious food?
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Carbohydrates are broken down into glucose, proteins into amino acids, and fats into fatty acids and glycerol.
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You’ll remember that an increase in blood glucose levels tells our body to release insulin.
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When this happens, your body begins converting the new, incoming fatty acids into triglycerides and storing them in your fat cells.
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Your body also stops breaking down your existing fat storage. In other words, it stops turning triglycerides back into fatty acids.
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All of this changes between meals, when insulin levels decrease. With low levels of insulin, the opposite happens: triglycerides are broken down into free fatty acids, which are then used to produce energy.
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🥓 Making energy for an insulin resistant body
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When it comes to making energy from fats with insulin resistance, it’s not so much what happens immediately after a meal that’s important, it’s what happens *between* meals (when insulin levels drop).
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With insulin resistance, your body releases a lot more free fatty acids into the blood than it would if it were sensitive to insulin.
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🥥 The problem with too much free fatty acids
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Free fatty acids accumulate in organs that are not designed to store fat — like your kidneys, liver, heart, and skeletal muscle.
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Why is this so dangerous? It makes it difficult to use free fatty acids for energy. It also leads to cell dysfunction and death in those organs. This condition is known as lipotoxicity.
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🥜 Fatty acids with insulin resistance
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In short: with insulin resistance, fatty acids are not used efficiently for fuel, but accumulate outside of fat cells, causing damage to important organs.
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👩‍🔬 Reference list here: confidencenotes.com/fatty-acids-to-energy-insulin-resistance